Thursday, August 6, 2009

I Like When People Cut to the Quick

With all the talk about abortion and fetal rights, we realise that for some, the argument on behalf of the unborn simply doesn't carry any significance. They refuse to acknowledge fetal rights, despite the scientific evidence, but hold fast to the belief that women have the right to control their own bodies, even if that means terminating the life of their child.

Why so adamant to maintain legal abortion? why are they so firmly entrenched in their position of being pro-choice and will not recognize the findings of medical science?

Well, I have always suspected that the real reason behind this stubbornness is the fact that abortion is absolutely necessary for the culture spawned by the sexual revolution of the 60's. And recently, I have found that this is being expressed by a number of writers who put it much more eloquently than I could. So here are some links to some very good articles.

"....one of the pro-choicers finally blurted out: "We're pro-sex and you're anti-sex," meaning, according to Vree, that "they're for lots of sex in lots of forms while we pro-lifers feel it should be limited to heterosexual marriage. . . . They made it abundantly clear that they're committed to the sexual revolution, and that revolution will wither without the insurance which is abortion and this is their bottom-line concern."

"Men these days can choose only sex, not fatherhood; mothers alone determine whether children shall be allowed to exist. Legalized abortion was supposed to grant enormous freedom to women, but it has had the perverse result of freeing men and trapping women.The likelihood of this cultural development was seen by the radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon. In an essay called "Privacy vs. Equality," MacKinnon argued that "abortion's proponents and opponents share a tacit assumption that women do significantly control sex. Feminist investigations suggest otherwise. Sexual intercourse ... cannot simply be presumed coequally determined." Indeed, she added, "men control sexuality," and "Roe does not contradict this."

Easy access to abortion has increased the expectation and frequency of sexual intercourse (including unprotected intercourse) among young people, making it more difficult for a woman to deny herself to a man without losing him, thus increasing pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections....

Prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, it was commonly understood that a man should offer a woman marriage in case of pregnancy, and many did so. But with the legalization of abortion, men started to feel that they were not responsible for the birth of children and consequently not under any obligation to marry. In gaining the option of abortion, many women have lost the option of marriage. Liberal abortion laws have thus considerably increased the number of families headed by a single mother, resulting in what some economists call the "feminization of poverty."

Throughout human history, children have been the consequence of natural sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children, and society had somehow to facilitate their upbringing.... Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman's choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world."

- Her Choice, Her Problem, How Abortion Empowers Men by Richard Stith, published in First Things #195

"America continues to have some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world. The pro-life movement has made some progress in its arguments, shifting the center of debate, yet it has failed to put even a dent in Roe v. Wade and successor rulings. Three and a half decades after Roe, the abortion casualty toll approaches a staggering 50 million. Why then, in the face of its abominably bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically? My answer is that abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution. We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century, and there is a widespread social understanding, especially acute among elites, that if there is going to be sex outside of marriage, there are going to be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution for this social problem.If you're going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs. By the same token, if you're going to have a sexual revolution, you've got to be ready to clean out the debris. After thirty five years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society we are still adding bodies to the heap."

1 comment:

"A factor usually overlooked is the ideology of sexual liberation. Those of us who work in AIDS don’t realize how much the values and ideology of sexual freedom and liberation influence our thinking. It helps explain why until very recently, faith-based organizations were largely excluded from AIDS prevention even though FBOs run many of the hospitals, clinics and schools in Africa."